A Dutch Collection in New York
Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 18 September 2009 — 3 January 2010
Edited by Deborah Krohn and Peter Miller with Marybeth De Filippis, $75
This autumn the Bard Graduate Center will participate in a state-wide celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage and the legacy of Dutch culture in New York with a landmark exhibition, Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick. Organized by the BGC and the New-York Historical Society and curated by Marybeth De Filippis and Deborah Krohn, Dutch New York will make a major contribution to the quadricentennial and to the scholarship of colonial New York by focusing on the life and times of a woman who during the seventeenth century lived in the rural village of Flatbush on eastern Long Island, a neighborhood still known by that name in the borough of Brooklyn today. The exhibition helps elucidate what the historian Russell Shorto has called the “forgotten colony” in his book The Island at the Center of the World. Indeed, the British roots of New York City are recognized far more widely than the Dutch, despite the city’s visible connections to the Dutch founders, most evident in street names such as Amsterdam Avenue and Varick Street.
Covered Bowl from Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia), early 18th century, silver (Gemeentemuseum, The Hague)
Dutch New York offers an innovative approach to exhibition practice by using the probate inventory of Margrieta van Varick’s possessions compiled in 1696 as a means of examining life and culture in colonial New York. Born in Amsterdam in 1649, Margrieta spent several years at the other end of the Dutch colonial world in the Far East, primarily in Malacca (present day Malaysia) before returning to The Netherlands with her minister husband Rudolphus. In 1686 Margrieta and her family crossed the Atlantic to settle in Flatbush where Rudolphus was minister of the Dutch Reform Church and where she opened a textile shop, having brought with them an astonishing array of Eastern and European goods.
This exhibition is organized in five sections, each delineating a theme relevant to Margrieta van Varick’s life as well as exploring the wide range of goods in her possession when she died in late 1695. The exhibition first examines the inventory as a document of historical research and curatorial practice. A digital film (also available online) features an interview with renowned historian Natalie Zemon Davis in which she considers the various challenges confronting historians who use inventories for research purposes, as well as the role of women in the seventeenth century.
For the full description of the exhibition, click here»
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Lecture — Inventory: Text and Context, Bernard Herman
Thursday, 19 November 2009, 6-8 pm ($25 / $17)
RSVP required to 212.501.3011, programs@bgc.bard.edu
What can an inventory tell us? How can we use an artifact of the legal system to tease out relationships between people and their relationship to things? How does such a document translate into an exhibition? Bernard Herman, a leading scholar of American material culture, will draw on his vast knowledge of both things and people in a conversation with cultural historian Catherine Whalen and exhibition co-curator Deborah Krohn. The conversation will be followed by an exhibition viewing and reception. Bernard Herman is Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Art History, University of Delaware. Deborah Krohn is associate professor and coordinator for history and theory of museums at the Bard Graduate Center as well as co-curator of the Dutch New York exhibition. Catherine Whalen is assistant professor at the Bard Graduate Center.
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Study Day — Reflecting on Silver: Manufacture, Markets, and Meaning in Early New York
Friday, 20 November 2009 ($125 / $100 discount)
RSVP required to 212.501.3011, programs@bgc.bard.edu
This study day will focus on silver in New York in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as an object signifying wealth, cultivation, and mastery. Concentrating on works by silversmiths Benjamin Wynkoop, Cornelius Kierstede, and Peter Van Dyck, curators Marybeth De Filippis, Beth Carver Wees, and Debra Schmidt Bach will consider aspects of stylistic influence, marketing of silver, and workshop practices. A visit to the studio of master silversmith Ubaldo Ubaldo “>Ubaldo “>Vitali in Maplewood, New Jersey, will provide an examination of the technical knowledge and cultural influences surrounding the production of silver through the centuries. Admission to the study day includes lunch and round-trip transportation to the Ubaldo Vitale studio. Marybeth De Filippis is assistant curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society as well as co-curator of the Dutch New York exhibition. Beth Carver Wees is curator in the Department of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Debra Schmidt Bach is assistant curator of decorative arts at the New-York Historical Society and a PhD candidate at the BGC. Ubaldo Vitali is a fourth-generation Roman silversmith, conservator, and art historian.
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A helpful article about the exhibition written by Marybeth De Filippis appears in the September issue of The Magazine Antiques.
Furniture at the Wallace
The Wallace Collection highlights the cabinet-maker, Johann Gottlob Fiedler with a small exhibition and study day. From the museum’s website:
Study Day: Johann Gottlob Fiedler, Eighteenth-Century German Cabinet Maker
Wallace Collection, London, Thursday 15 October 2009 (£7)
Johan Gottlob Fiedler, Commode, ca. 1786 (Wallace Collection)
Achim Stiegel, Curator of Furniture at the Kunstgewerbe Museum Berlin, will present latest research on the cabinet making of Johann Gottlob Fiedler and the small group of cabinets made for patrons such as Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, later King Friedrich Wilhelm II. Jürgen Huber, Senior Furniture Conservator, Wallace Collection, will discuss the recent conservation of the Collection’s superb Fiedler commode from c.1786 and the innovative features in its construction. See the commode in a special exhibition in the Conservation Gallery,
Vorsprung durch Technik: The Innovative Work of the Cabinet-maker Johann Gottlob Fiedler (6 June – 29 November 2009).
Conference on Sexuality and Gender Identity
Before Sex
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 23 October 2009
Until recently we’ve thought of the modern sex/gender system and homosexual identity as socio-intellectual developments of the later nineteenth century. But over the past three decades, evidence and arguments have accumulated to suggest that the categories of oppositional gender difference and male same-sex identity coalesced much earlier than that–during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Specialized historical research has pursued different aspects of the topic in disparate directions. The time has come to consolidate this research in a conference that brings together four of the most important scholars in the field and an informed audience (there will be ample time for discussion) to conceive, debate, and test a hypothesis of the first importance for early modern historians and the history of sexuality.
Thomas Laqueur (University of California-Berkeley), “Sex, Gender, and the Enlightenment Project”
Laura Gowing (King’s College, London), “Women, Bodies, and Sex in the Seventeenth-Century World.”
Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire), “Sexual Knowledge and Sexual Behavior in the Eighteenth Century.”
Randolph Trumbach (Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of NY), “The Emergence of the Modern Homosexual Minority in Enlightenment Europe and the Production of a Heterosexual Majority, 1700-1750.”
The conference begins at 8:30am and last throughout the day in the Teleconference Room of the Alexander Library (4th floor), 169 College Avenue. For more information contact Michael McKeon, michael.mckeon@rutgers.edu
Conference on Scottish Craftsmanship in the Americas
As noted by The Magazine Antiques in its ‘Guide to Fall Symposiums’:
Transatlantic Craftsmanship: Scotland and the Americas in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, Winterthur, DE, 7-10 October 2009
The decorative and applied arts in colonial and early 19th-century America are deeply infused with Scottish influence. This major international conference will examine, for the first time, the transatlantic relationships of Scottish craftsmanship and Scottish immigrant craftsmen in the 18th and 19th centuries. From Edinburgh to Charleston, Aberdeen to Philadelphia, and Kilmarnock to New York, we will examine architecture, weaponry, furniture, silver, jewelry, ceramics, textiles, and glass to promote a greater understanding of the trade and influence of Scottish artists and manufacturers in America.
The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and National Museums Scotland, in partnership with Winterthur, and with additional support from the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will bring together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic to study Scotland’s role in the development of American material culture.
A full list of speakers and topics can be found through the Winterthur website»
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